Use Accounting Flexfields to design the structure of your General Ledger accounts. By providing flexible account structures, Accounting Flexfields enable you to take advantage of General Ledger flexible tools for recording and reporting accounting information. You can design an account structure that best meets the needs of your organization.
Accounting Flexfields let you:
Define a flexible account structure that accommodates your current organization, and anticipates the way you will run your organization in the future.
Define an account structure large enough to reflect the important aspects of your organization, but small enough so that it is manageable and meaningful.
Define an account structure that accommodates and properly classifies information from your other financial information sources.
Create an account structure that provides a logical ordering of values by grouping related accounts in the same range of values. Additionally, create an account structure that allows for expansion and development of new categories.
Warning: Plan your Accounting Flexfield structures carefully, including segment information such as segment order and field lengths. Once you define your Accounting Flexfields and enter flexfield values, you cannot change your structures. Attempting to do so may create data inconsistencies that impact the behavior of your application or require a complex conversion program. Changing your existing structures may also adversely affect the behavior of items that reference your present flexfield structure, such as financial statements, recurring journal entries, allocations, consolidations, cross-validation rules and shorthand aliases.
Warning: Oracle General Ledger has two types of key flexfields for the chart of accounts, the Accounting Flexfield and the General Ledger Flexfield. When defining or making permitted changes to your chart of accounts, always use the Accounting Flexfield. For a list of permitted chart of accounts changes, see Permitted Chart of Accounts Changes.
Define the Accounting Flexfield to create accounts that fit the specific needs of your organization. You choose the number of segments, the length of each segment, and the name and order of each segment in your account code structure.
General Ledger lets you quickly reorganize your company or agency by using parent values. Not only can you change reporting structures by assigning a range of child values to a new parent and using that parent in report definitions, but you can also maintain the old structure for comparative purposes by having the same range of child values rollup to two different parents.
For example, if your company reassigns a product to a different division, you can easily move the child values that rollup to the old parent level division to the new parent level division and produce reports for the new division.
You can review your summary accounting information from multiple perspectives.
For example, you may want a summary account that shows the total of all product sales for each division. You can also summarize the same set of detail accounts in a different way and see instead, the total sales of personal computer products across all divisions.
You can build your custom reports without programming by using your Oracle General Ledger application Financial Statement Generator. You can define reports online with complete control over the rows, columns and contents of your report.
Throughout General Ledger, you can use ranges to quickly specify a group of accounts. With a well-planned account structure, you can use ranges to group accounts in reports, to specify validation rules and to define summary accounts and reporting hierarchies.